US citizen living in Afghanistan kidnapped on way to work: Police

An American citizen who is living in Afghanistan was kidnapped on his way to work on Sunday, Kabul police said.

The kidnapping took place in the Karte Char area of Kabul, according to Mohammad Almas, the head of the Kabul police's crime investigation department.

Almas said the kidnappers posed in Afghan security force uniforms in order to trick the victim into stopping his vehicle.

Police originally said that the man, whose name has not been released, was working on a World Bank project with the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture. But later on Sunday, Alex Ferguson, a spokesman for the World Bank, denied the claim.

"No World Bank staff have been kidnapped," Ferguson told ABC News in an email. "Our understanding is that these reports refer to an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAIL) who is working for the National Horticulture and Livestock Project (NHLP), which is funded by a World Bank managed trust fund."

In a similar incident in August 2016, two foreign national professors working at the American University of Afghanistan were kidnapped at gunpoint in Kabul.

The professors, Timothy Weeks, an Australian, and Kevin King, an American, were last seen in a video released by the Taliban in January of this year, according to a report in The New York Times.